A fragile ceasefire in eastern Ukraine may have brought a temporary respite in the fighting but also may sow the seeds for a new conflict, NATO‘s supreme allied commander for Europe said Monday.
“That worries me greatly,” Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove said at an Atlantic Council event.
Though the Sept. 5 ceasefire has largely held in spite of shelling Monday in the separatist stronghold of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine that killed six people and injured 15, Breedlove said it has left the lines of supply for separatist forces from Russia “wide open,” allowing them to rearm.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian Defense Minister Valeriy Heletey said NATO countries were delivering arms to government forces, though four of the five countries he mentioned denied it, the Associated Press reported.
Breedlove said NATO is just beginning to craft a response to Russian aggression in eastern Europe and was taken by surprise by what he called the “hybrid” methods used to destabilize neighboring countries, such as the deployment of “little green men” — troops without insignia posing as local separatists.
“I think we can reset this alliance for this new challenge that we see in eastern Europe,” he said, noting that NATO spent 12 years trying to make Russia a partner — an effort that guided many decisions about defense spending, force levels and troop deployments.
That “reset” includes new measures designed to meet the Russian threat that are reminiscent of the Cold War. Alliance leaders at a summit in Wales earlier this month agreed to staff a new headquarters in eastern Europe tasked with defending countries concerned about the threat from Russia — particularly Poland and the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — increase rotations of U.S. and allied troops into those countries and create a new rapid-response force of several thousand troops that would preposition its supplies at eastern European bases.
Breedlove said future plans also should include ways to help NATO members respond to destabilization efforts that cannot clearly be attributed to an outside force — something which is needed to invoke the alliance’s collective defense requirement — and define what the alliance would do in the case of Russian aggression against non-members.
Though NATO troops on Monday began a 10-day exercise in western Ukraine in which some 200 U.S. troops are taking part, alliance leaders have been reluctant to commit to using force to defend Kiev from Russia or Russia-backed separatists. Ukraine is not currently a NATO member, though Kiev recently has pressed the alliance to allow it to join.
“Right now there is no NATO policy on what to do in those nations that find themselves outside of the alliance and not in the Russian Federation,” Breedlove said.
